Using e-tutor program and pre-lab assessment task to enhance laboratory experience of civil engineering students

Before attending a lab session, students are usually required to be familiarized with laboratory tasks through pre-lab preparation. While it was found pre-lab preparation was an effective way to promote student learning, the benefits of running pre-lab preparation were not fully investigated. Traditional lab description sheets may provide general information on safety operation procedures and pre-lab questions. However, if these pre-lab questions were not assessed, they could easily be ignored by students. In this research, pre-lab problems were designed to give unique parameters to each student. Students were required to solve the problems and obtain theoretical values which were verified later in a practical lab session. To minimize the marking load, the pre-lab submissions were automatically marked using the e-tutor program. Results showed that the pre-lab preparation program was successful in enhancing students' learning interests, in preventing plagiarism, and in increasing the efficiency of labs with the duration of a lab session being significantly reduced.